Heart of the Storm, page 11
“I hear a lot of things,” I said, rounding the box car and heading for the next rail car in line. It was about twenty feet ahead, a string of five corrugated metal cars led by an engine, and the nearest cover. Cover was the name of the game, a place to hide, something to walk behind without looking furtive. Shielding on at least one side from the dangers of being seen.
“There's a distant whine of something cutting through the air,” Lethe said, voice rising, indicating a concern. “Closing on us, I think.” She was peering into the sky, covering her eyes with a hand as she looked.
“Drones,” Wade said, grabbing me by the arm. When I looked over at him, his Chinese avatar offered a perfect look of concern tempered just below panic. “We need to run.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Idon't see anything,” I said, casting a look about as I went into a weightless float, letting my husband drag me, bodily, toward the line of boxcars ahead, while I searched the skies for the source of that droning noise. That was probably drones. “Sound seems to be coming from north-northwest. One to two hundred yards.”
“You Americans and your refusal to use the metric system,” Hades said, huffing as he sprinted along behind. Jian and Lethe were keeping up easily.
“Shut up, you probably default to leagues and furlongs. Jian,” I said, “maybe go incognito and scout around?”
He nodded, tossing his camo system at Lethe, who caught it. Before I could register him doing it, he was suddenly a cat, and bolting under the nearby train car, disappearing between the wheels. Lethe shoveled his camo system into her backpack as she ran.
“Less than a hundred meters out,” I said; we were about halfway up the cargo boxcars, and I was still not exactly sure what that noise was, though I had to admit it was sounding more like a quad-copter drone. Or a host of them, rather.
“Let's get low,” Wade said, and dove down, under the train, dragging me with him. Hades and Lethe followed, a little less gainly in the former's case, but the old man made it.
“You really think we can lose them by dodging under a train?” I asked, floating beside him as he lay between the tracks, tons of metal boxcar shielding us from above, the wheels giving us a small measure of protection on the sides. Our cover wasn't going to fool anyone for long, but in this game, sometimes seconds could mean the difference between life and death.
“I can't hear you in my ear at all,” Wade said, looking me right in the eye – though both our eyes looked quite different. “Whatever the Chinese are running here, it's jamming our comms. We should turn everything off. Any signal emission could be like a beacon for them to locate us.”
“Turn off your comms,” I said, taking a moment to shut off my phone and earwig. I saw Lethe do the same, but Hades was out of my sight. “Let's not give them anything to work with. What about Jian?”
“He'll have to figure it out on his own,” Wade said, trying to control his breathing. “If he didn't hear you.”
A cat howled furiously and ran underneath the train before adding, in Jian's voice, “There's a whole Chinese army coming this way from the north! Metas and all!”
“Jian, run for it!” I shouted back. “Go bird if you can and get the hell out of here!”
“You gonna call an 'every man for himself?'” Lethe asked.
“Tempting,” I said. “Breaking into teams might give us a better chance to evade.”
“Ah, yes, the 'divide and be conquered' strategy,” Hades muttered.
“You two, get out of here while I provide you a distraction,” I said. “Wade–”
“Nope,” he said, and rolled out from under the train in the direction Jian had come from, already opening fire with his rifle.
“Damn you, Wade!” I shouted, and with one look back, “Get out of here!” to Lethe, who nodded, then rolled hard to the side, as did Hades, in the opposite direction and away from the train.
I shucked off my camo and backpack and let them fall to the earth, hoping they'd still be here when I came back, since Sienna Nealon stood out in China like a bare ass in a field of daisies. I could see a whole host of Chinese soldiers coming around a building about fifty yards away, a supply depot at the edge of the train yard, and they were flooding out, rifles chattering already. Bullets were impacting on the train car behind me, like the angriest patter of rain you can imagine.
Wade had ducked behind the train car and was answering their fire with highly accurate bursts, forcing them to keep their heads down. He was doing an amazing job for being one guy against at least fifty, but I knew how those numbers worked out in the long run, and I leapt up and took to the skies, rising in a tight arc, then diving toward the Chinese forces.
It always came down to this, didn't it? No matter how hard I tried to keep my head down, somehow my enemies always came for me. They came in force, too, because they knew better than to try and come singly, in their little ones and twos. Someone blasted at me with a green laser, and I ducked it just in time, hitting the ground squarely in the middle of their formation. Gun barrels swung toward me, trying to take aim, inadvertently forming a circular firing squad in a panicked rush to eliminate their target before she could eliminate them.
Too late.
The burst of flames I let loose was the stuff of legends still talked about in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to this day. I watched faces dissolve, tissue burn off, skeletons blacken and char as screams were consumed as the fires sought oxygen and found it in the last breaths of the Chinese soldiers Fen Liu had sent to die at my hand.
When the flames stopped, I counted four guys still clustered around me, in various states of cringing. Not one of them had been harmed; one was wreathed in his own flames, another two were covered over in blue plasma, and the last was just standing there, naked, amazed that he was still alive.
I rocketed toward him first, kneeing him in the face and shattering his skull. I didn't know what kind of meta he was that he'd survived my blast, and I didn't need to know anymore, as I caved the side of his head in like it had been smashed with a mallet. He went sideways and landed on the scorched and blackened ground, boneless, nerveless, and properly dead.
The two plasma types moved toward me with aggressive, practiced intent. They tried to flank, one moving to get behind me while the other advanced straight-on.
I took a brief flight backward and put my Brance voice on, then offered them a concerto of pain.
The sonic blasts hit them like being seated next to an amp at a Rammstein concert; the blue plasma covering them flickered and flared, revealing bare skin. They hit their knees, quite vulnerable to someone jamming a sonic icepick into their eardrums. I rocketed toward them, deploying my energy blade as I flew past one–
His head came off and rolled a little ways on the pavement. Scratch one.
I arced around toward the second, who was woozy after my sonic attack (now halted). He was trying to get himself up, to recover before I could come around and cut him in half. I found myself with a feral grin as I came at him head on, energy blade extended in front of me like a damned pike, longer than I'd ever made it before by half or better. I was going to lance this sucker like I was a knight of old riding down a frigging peasant, and by his wide eyes, he knew it.
And then...he simply exploded.
Not in plasma, no, but in a more conventional sense. His body exploded as something collided with him from above, sending pieces of flesh and bone and blood flying in all directions.
And as the last vestiges of my sonic scream faded in my ears, I realized they'd been replaced by another sound, just as loud and with a similar hum–
The drones.
They came down on me in a rain, exploding on impact and sending shards perforating my body. I lost control of my flight and gravity reclaimed me. I came crashing down in the bloody, skidmarked mess of the dead plasma type, my gore and his mixing as pains indicating violation of my body and my flesh screamed all across my back and sides.
I rolled and crashed into the side of the Chinese rail depot ahead, smashing through the concrete wall and coming to rest in a twisted mass. Staring straight up, I could see a corrugated metal roof looking down at me, and daylight filtering in from the hole I'd made through a cloud of dust.
A distant hum seemed to draw closer and closer, as my consciousness winked out, the blackness smothering the daylight from my sight.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Lethe
“Did you hear that?” Hades asked, making Lethe turn, if only to look at him. They'd made a hard sprint across the rail yard and, reaching the edge of a cluster of residential towers, had found nothing between them and blending in on the streets.
“I heard it,” she said, and seized his arm, dragging him forward. It had been a series of small explosions, behind them, centered on where they'd been moments before, or at least near to it.
“We should go back,” Hades said. He started to turn, to pull against her.
“The best thing we can do for Sienna now is get lost,” Lethe said, grabbing him and tugging him back. A green space was ahead, somewhere they could lose themselves in the pedestrians and trees. Whoever was running this operation had counted on moving fast and hitting hard, along with drone support. “In a battle against an entire army, you and I are a liability.”
Hades hesitated, then went along. “You are right, of course,” he said, holographic camouflage figure smoothing his hair, just like he did in real life. “I sometimes long for the days of old, when I could destroy an entire army by myself. And I forget those days are gone, long gone, and never to return.”
“We've both seen better days,” Lethe said darkly, moving forward, though her heart was behind them, in that rail yard. But her brain told her she needed to follow Sienna's command and go, go, go, rather than follow her heart into a danger she might not survive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jian
Jian ran. He ran because she told him to, he ran because he saw the Red Army uniforms, and all the days of his confinement in a Chinese prison came back to him, and he could not bear the thought of being caught by them again.
He was a cat, and he ran, and ran, and paid little attention to his surroundings for running as he did.
And no one took a bit of notice of him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Wade
Idove under the train when the blast of fire came out of Sienna and devoured the army around her, catching the edges of the rail depot building on fire once the flash had receded and the rods and cones in my eyes had begun to reset. The flames had reached out far enough to touch the train above me, and the metal squealed at the heat.
Four men remained around Sienna, not dead. She dove toward one and turned his head into a canoe. Two others, covered in plasma, lined up against her. My bullets would be useless against them.
But a third, his body wreathed in Gavrikov fire, looked like he was made for Wade, so I rolled out from beneath the train and put a three-shot burst into him.
Only the hottest Gavrikovs, the true masters of the power, could possibly hope to burn with enough heat to slag bullets. Even Sienna didn't have that skill down, and she was probably among the most practiced users of the power at this point. Certainly she had the edge over these Johnny-Come-Latelies in the Red Army, whose powers had come from a syringe. (Or maybe Jian-y Come Latelies, in this case.)
My bullets stitched a pattern across the small of his back and staggered him, sending him to one knee. Not my finest hour when it came to marksmanship, but not bad for a guy on the move, at a couple hundred yards.
He lifted his head and flames boiled from his hands. He was powering up to shoot them at Sienna while her back was turned and she was dealing with the plasma boys. I had my doubts as to what kind of results his attack would yield, but none about the fact I wanted him dead so I didn't have to find out if they'd affect her adversely.
Lifting my hand, I conjured to mind the memory of Stanley Croftsburg and sent a blast of purple rocketing at him.
I tend to aim for center mass, especially when things are hairy and my heart rate is in the triple digits. Aim is a finicky thing, and a small variation in control at the hand can translate into a massive shift in point of impact a hundred yards out. This time was no exception, and my purple murder beam hit him in the left side just below his arm, carving a six-inch half-circle out of his ribcage.
The guy spun and fell, flames billowing skyward from his hands, his own aim thrown off as he released his power.
Success.
I didn't let up, though; his fire started to fade as the pain caught up to him, and lifted my rifle and sighted in on him again, drilling him with another three-shot burst into the back. This time, one of them managed to hit him in the back of the neck and he toppled over, flames extinguished. I started to pursue further, to confirm the kill, as I watched Sienna cut the head off one of her plasma opponents, his blue glow faded to mere nudity when a whistling from above somehow broke through the ringing in my ears from all my shooting.
Drones. Incoming.
“Sienna!” I shouted, but too late. The first impact of an anti-personnel drone exploded in front of her, turning her second opponent into an explosion of blood, bone, and human slurry. The drones were small-ish, no bigger than a couple shoeboxes put together, and when they blew up, they sent shrapnel flying in a cone of destruction.
I'd seen these type of drones before, just a small quadcopter with a shaped charge, a few steps up from the sort of thing a terrorist would build in a garage with an IED. The sheer number of them was staggering; I could see hundreds sweeping across the sky in steady waves.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, watching Sienna take a hit and crash down, her momentum causing her to Kool-Aid Man through a concrete wall and come to rest inside.
And as soon as she was off the visual scopes of the drones, they started looking for another target.
Which was me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Fen Liu
“These are the only two we have on visual at present,” Defense Minister Guoqiang said, chins jiggling as he adjusted the picture in on Nealon, who'd gone through a wall and whose legs were all that was visible of her, and a man who looked Chinese but surely wasn't. Who could it be? Not Graves; he was reported missing in action, no longer assisting Nealon, along with his mother. “We haven't identified the male yet.”
Fen Liu just smiled. “That will be the husband.”
Guoqiang's brow crinkled on the screen. “How can you tell? It could be the brother, it could be Byerly, or one of the Coleman brothers–”
“Look at the way he handles that rifle,” Fen Liu said. “The brother is hopeless with guns. Byerly is perhaps worse. And neither of the Coleman brothers possess much talent for gunplay, either. No, it's the husband.” She leaned forward, peering at the figure on the screen. “How many drones do we have in the skies above Anshun?”
“A few hundred now,” Guoqiang said. “But more are coming.”
“Send a dozen at him,” she said, leaning back in her chair, enjoying the cool touch of the leather. “Send the rest at her. Do not stop until there are none left, if necessary. Overkill, you understand me?”
“Yes, Premier,” Minister Guoqiang said, and she could have sworn she heard him clop his shoes together. Like a good lackey.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Wade
Iknew I was in trouble the moment the kill drones paused. That could mean only one thing.
Target acquisition.
And lucky me: I was at least one target.
Steely coolness does not come naturally to many people, including a fair number of Navy SEALs. To put it a way I've heard others say it: there are two types of people, trained and untrained.
If I'd been staring down hundreds of quadcopter kill drones about to suicide me, and I'd lacked my training, I'd probably have run for it, because why not? It'd take a fanatic to stare down the barrel of these things that were going to hunt you, find you, blow up next to your face and send pieces of your skull in every direction all at once.
I was many things: annoying, irritating, stubborn, a real pain in the ass, and a decent Magic: The Gathering player.
A suicidal fanatic I was not.
The optimal countermeasure for these types of drones? Nets. Big honking fields of nets to keep them the hell away from you, so they could explode twenty, thirty feet from your face, where they'd be more or less harmless, merely showering you with a light rain of metallic debris. Their strength was also their downfall: tiny little drones could only pack a tiny little explosive, not a big one that could toast you from across a room or a football field.
Why nets? Because the drones were so small, and moved so fast that trying to shoot them down was deemed impossible. Try hitting a target the size of an owl moving at a hundred miles per hour. Now hit fifty in a row doing the exact same thing. That's why nets.
But I didn't have nets. I didn't have anything that could stop these things at the appropriate distance. I had a rifle. I had bullets. I had attitude.
And there was that stubbornness thing. I had that in spades.
Run, they'd chase me down and blow me to smithereens. Try to hide, they'd wait me out until the army showed up, if they didn't follow me under the train and blast me there.
But shoot...and I'd be shooting until I ran out of bullets or ran out of time.
All this ran through my mind in the space of a second.
My best decisions tended to involve some aspect of instinct. In my gut, I knew the right thing to do. It might have been inherent. Or it might have been the product of all that training, where the SEALs had gotten hold of me when I was young and foolish, before my powers manifested, and they'd tried to beat that imperfection out of me with middling results.
